Breast-feeding of infants has important medical and moral benefits including nutrition and immunity to illnesses. Furthermore, the breast-feeding processes also help bonding the mother and the child.
There is an essential need for monitoring and measuring the amount of milk an infant consumed in every meal.
The conventional, ancient and rather primitive method for measuring the amount of milk an infant has consumed is to weigh the infant before and after breast-feeding. This method is quite inaccurate and does not provide real time information.
An attempt to tackle this problem has been made in U.S. Pat. No. 5,827,191 (Rosenfeld), proposing to employ an elastic nipple with a built-in propeller-based flow meter, thus giving real time information of the consumed milk quantity.
The obstacles in reducing this method into practice seems to be technically insurmountable; besides, an obvious disadvantage resides in that the nipple partitions the baby from the natural contact with the flesh of his mother.
The same seems to apply to International Publication No. WO 01/54488 (Vaslov Traders (Pty) Ltd.).
It is therefore the prime object of the invention to provide real time measurement information about milk quantity consumed by an infant during breast-feeding.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a method and a device for accurate measuring of the quantity of milk an infant consumes during breast-feeding without creating any partition between the infant and his mother's breast.
It is a still further object of the invention to utilize an ultrasonic flow meter of the Doppler Effect type for measuring the milk quantity consumed by an infant.